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I didn't have surgery to lose weight, but I lost >110 lb via diet/some exercise and I feel similar to the people in TFA -- things haven't changed as much as I e

I didn't have surgery to lose weight, but I lost >110 lb via diet/some exercise and I feel similar to the people in TFA -- things haven't changed as much as I expected. For me, a big reason is that my overall body shape is the same. I'm overweight, not obese, going by BMI (though pretty close to the borderline). but I still look fat in all the old places I used to look fat. I've gone down a couple clothing sizes, but it's very hard to see the change in a mirror unless other people tell me.

jackling 4y ago
I went through the same thing, lost a bunch of weight, people around me noticed, but I still had my belly and love handles. Ended up gaining the weight back, maybe if I kept up with the healthy diet I would've eventually gotten the physique I wanted.
P_I_Staker 4y ago
I can't say I relate completely, but I do to some extent. 60-100lbs makes an enormous difference for me, even as a tall dude. That said, even bottoming out at 6'2" 155lbs, there were still noticeable pockets of fat in the "bad areas" (chest, belly). This was probably due to low muscle mass, but it can be pretty crushing. All that work and you don't look any better without a shirt on... but cloths fit better and I definitely looked better. That weight makes around a 5-20 year difference in appearance for me. You could argue this should be a part of the fitness conversation. You probably won't achieve perfection and people with long term weight issues may never really get the desired results. This is definitely an area where body positivity is important.
PeterStuer 4y ago
Yep, not looking fat is a non-linear function. The good news: you are/have been on the slowest part of the curve. WRT looks&perceptions, things are going to accelerate along the journey.
andrewstuart 4y ago
>> diet/some exercise Can you be specific?
- oneepic 4y ago
  Sure. For context, I started about 150-160 lb overweight, meaning that many lbs away from having a BMI in the normal range. I was very obese, BMI in the 40's, I think. I started out by just restricting my calories in my diet (1100-1300 cal each day roughly [1], but I still saw some decent wt loss with up to 1600-1700 cals). My core weight loss diet has changed *a lot* but has generally been a mix of whole grains, fruit, veggies, dairy, and a serving of poultry. Hard to explain in one post, but I can try to be more specific if you'd like. 3-5 meals a day, no I.F., just ate less and I felt less hungry overall. The cravings have come and gone at different periods, though, never totally gone. For the first ~70 lbs, I was able to lose 10 lbs in 1-2 weeks by staying on the diet religiously each day. I mainly ate the same exact meal plan every day. (I spent a lot of my day thinking about all the great food I missed.) After that week or two, I would "take a break" and get takeout or other nonsense each day for some weeks following that. Perhaps lucky on my part, I wouldn't generally see much weight come back, maybe only 2 or 3 lbs. In summary, my cycle was diet 1-2wks, break for a while until I convinced myself to get back on the wagon, and repeat. It always helped to see that the first few days of dieting were the ones where I lost the most weight, before it slowed down. To answer the exercise part, literally all I did was take 1-2 walks a day of 30 min each. Not a brisk walk, just walking around the town or our trails. Occasionally I felt like trying to jog or run, or do some lifting, but never got consistent with it. Sometimes I paced around my apartment thinking about how to solve work problems, but that was about it. Since I lost that first 70 lb, the rate of weight loss has gradually slowed. These days I sometimes lift weights or do cardio to help see a little more loss each day. If I'm consistent, my weight loss is like 3-4 lbs/week, but I haven't done it lately. Gotta get back on my diet soon. [1] sidenote, that includes fiber calories which I think technically are not supposed to be included. I'm no nutritionist, even though I came up with a lot of this diet myself using some Internet research and Cronometer.
  - Teknoman117 4y ago
    I'm basically doing the same thing right now. Started at 420 in November, need to be at ~220 (I'm a bulky 6'4 dude), so, 200 pounds to get rid of. The most I ever lost in recent years was when I went on Kaiser's medically monitored weight-loss program (a soft prerequisite to be eligible for bariatric surgery through them). Liquid diet, 860 calories a day, frequent blood work, etc. I lost 50 lbs in 3 months. Gained it all back over the following year. Fearing all the side effects, I never ended up doing the bariatric surgery. This time around I'm not "cheating" my way through it. Keeping track of everything religiously has kept me honest about what I'm eating, and I've been taking a 3+ mile walk most days. Been trying to keep a pace that makes me sweaty even in the cool weather of my area. I'm back down to the weight I was after the Kaiser thing (50 lbs lost), but I'm not craving all the things I did then. Diet has basically been whole grains, lots of veggies, turkey, fruit, nuts, oats, and the occasional fish. Overnight oats is my go-to breakfast - steel cut oats, chia seeds, soy milk, fruit, nuts. I've been making a bunch of things from the Forks over Knives vegan diet. I can't bring myself to go full vegan, I love fish too much. Either way, mostly keeping it under 1700 calories a day. I recently joined my friends' gym group and plan to go regularly. Been keeping up with them for the last two weeks so we'll see where that goes. Maybe try to get some muscles to fill in some of the loose skin I'll have.
mjthrowaway1 4y ago
I tell people that losing weight is reverse Pareto. The last 20% of the work is worth 80% of the results.
- kar5pt 4y ago
  It's also 80% of the effort.
  - mjthrowaway1 4y ago
    Doesn’t feel like it to me. I eat 2000-2500cal/day and try to maintain 3500-4500cal burn(1hr lifting, 1hr peloton bike, 1.5hr hike daily). I keep my cardio around 140-145bpm so pretty leisurely. Increasing intensity just made me hungrier. It’s a lot of time taken out of my day but it shows results fast and I’m never hungry. A cheat day is a 500cal deficit and a normal day is 750-1250cal deficit. I know everyone has their weight loss strategy but this is by far the least mentally taxing method I’ve used. It helps to stay motivated when you see results every other day as well.
nyokodo 4y ago
> but it's very hard to see the change in a mirror unless other people tell me Losing 110 lbs is going to be very obvious even on someone with a very large frame, but, your perspective may be highly warped preventing you from seeing the weight loss. It might be worth talking to a professional trained in body image issues. Edit: Oh, and I should say congratulations! That is awesome progress!
- oneepic 4y ago
  Thanks for the kind words. That's a fair point, it might be warped, although the micro-optimizer in me is leaning towards just losing more weight and seeing if I notice the change after some more progress. One thing your comment reminded me of -- I was surprised to see a lot of my sense of weight loss came not from a mirror, but just feeling my old fat body parts. It used to be more dense, due to the fat, now it feels a lot more like excess skin. The skin is almost as big as before, but much lighter and more hollow, if that makes sense. [edit: added "sense of"]
  - kcplate 4y ago
    I completely understand. I lost a total of 170 lbs. While that put me into “I am not the fattest person in the room” category, I am still in the group of “fat people in the room” at least visually. The reason is excess skin. So even after four years of being at the lower weight, in reality the only way to get rid of excess skin is surgical. I am not willing to do that, so I have come to accept that even after all my efforts, I am never going to look svelte.
    - PeterStuer 4y ago
      FWIW, The skin reduction surgery is completely benign, especially compared to the invasive stomach reduction/clamping/bypass surgeries common in this domain. While this has been some time ago and I have not met her for years, an acquaintance confided that the skin reduction gave her the confidence and joy that kept her from relapsing into old bad habits.
  - scohesc 4y ago
IkmoIkmo 4y ago
Would be cool to see two comparison pictures (no head needed). 110lbs is a fantastic result, I wonder if it’s hard to see for you because it was a gradual change?
- hnburnsy 4y ago
  check out r/progresspics, amazing how different people look after weight loss.
- oneepic 4y ago
  Yeah, I think that's a significant part of the explanation. I'm not comfortable with sharing the photos, though, to be honest.
paulpauper 4y ago
depends on your starting too. 110 lbs will not look like that much if you started at 400 vs 230
ipaddr 4y ago
I lost 100 pounds in a month and a half (cipro poisoning). I went from 240 to 142. I became skin and bones and I lost fat in those hard to lose places. I instantly felt different and people treated me differently. What weight did you start/end at?
- oneepic 4y ago
  310 then, 200ish now. I got down to 193 for my latest physical, but have been off my diet for the past couple weeks.
  - Arainach 4y ago
    Not that I doubt you, but I'm surprised that you don't notice the changes. That's a range where there are huge differences in everyone I know who's managed to do it - particularly in the face, but in the body as a whole. I've only managed to drop 40 so far (260-220), but even then the difference in the gut is visible (even if many other areas aren't as much as I could dream, to be fair to your point).
    - oneepic 4y ago
      Congrats on your weight loss, 40 lbs is nothing to write off in my book. I do have a picture of myself from about 300 lbs, and I did look much chubbier then. I guess I mean to say that my overall shape is still along the same pattern -- large gut, thighs, calves, arms, and face/head, etc. Maybe this is not a great analogy, but y=x^2 is a big difference from y=2x^2, and yet it's still a quadratic function -- they don't look too different on a graphing calculator.
      - treis 4y ago
        There's no way. Even dropping from 270 to 245 was a couple belt sizes and one shirt size for me. Going from 310 to 200 is at least 3 shirt sizes and maybe 10 inches for pants. It's like 50 liters by volume. Think 25 big soda bottles or 13 milk jugs worth of fat. It might be worth your while to talk to someone about body dismorphia.
D13Fd 4y ago
Wow. I lost much less than that, a bit more than 20 lbs, in the last 2 months and it feels like a big change to me. My old clothes fit again and I don’t snore as much. It’s different for everyone I guess.
- oneepic 4y ago
  The clothes thing was a huge motivator for me. I was at 2X (in US measurements) and was about to burst out of those :) (edit: I neglected to mention, congratulations. It's no small feat to lose weight.)
- devin 4y ago
  I’m in the same boat as you. Not even 20 lbs, but even 10 for me is a change in waist size and ring size. When I’m kicking butt on my exercise my wedding band starts to accidentally fall off and I can pretty clearly see a difference overall. It’s strange how my fingers getting slim is perhaps more noticeable to me than my waist or whatever, but that is my cue I’m on a roll.
Teknoman117 4y ago
The only way I've been able to tell visually so far are before/after pictures. I'm down 55 pounds after 6 months (diet and exercise) and I don't feel like I've noticed changes in the mirror. However, I've gone down a number of belt sizes and the pants I previously wore around my waist can now be worn comfortably over my gut. Visually it only occurred to be because a friend sent me a picture from a dinner I had with them and I saw how much smaller I looked.
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
Initially I was in a similar boat, but recently I stumbled on a way to be more aware and positive about the change. I lost 55 pounds and still felt like a chonker. At the time, I only had about 10 pounds to go to hit the "ideal weight" I'd set for myself (which was still at the high end of the acceptable range, based on BMI). I never did hit that number; I ended up wandering around that plateau for 1-2 years, feeling thoroughly fat the entire time. A recent injury led to me not being able to lift (for now), and so I've lost about 3-7 pounds of muscle and gained about 14-18 pounds of fat. Now I can definitely notice the difference! For me, it's the little stuff that really drove it home -- my face is noticeably chubbier (to me), and my rings and shoes fit more tightly. I wouldn't recommend going about it this way, but it definitely drove home a lot of retroactive gratitude for what I had -- and sparked some motivation to get it back.
pengaru 4y ago
The thing about getting to a normal weight is it makes being active so much easier, more fun, and less destructive. So once you get the weight off you gotta live the active life and the fit shape will emerge. Being normal weight is basically easy mode for being active, but it doesn't guarantee fitness if you still don't play the game.
krageon 4y ago
If you've lost that much weight and you can't see it (where others can), that's not normal psychological functioning. That's an eating disorder.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  AS someone who's lost a similar amount of weight (actually a bit more), trust me when I tell you that no one loses that kind of weight intentionally without cultivating an eating disorder.

jackling 4y ago

I went through the same thing, lost a bunch of weight, people around me noticed, but I still had my belly and love handles. Ended up gaining the weight back, maybe if I kept up with the healthy diet I would've eventually gotten the physique I wanted.

P_I_Staker 4y ago

I can't say I relate completely, but I do to some extent. 60-100lbs makes an enormous difference for me, even as a tall dude. That said, even bottoming out at 6'2" 155lbs, there were still noticeable pockets of fat in the "bad areas" (chest, belly). This was probably due to low muscle mass, but it can be pretty crushing. All that work and you don't look any better without a shirt on... but cloths fit better and I definitely looked better. That weight makes around a 5-20 year difference in appearance for me. You could argue this should be a part of the fitness conversation. You probably won't achieve perfection and people with long term weight issues may never really get the desired results. This is definitely an area where body positivity is important.

PeterStuer 4y ago

Yep, not looking fat is a non-linear function. The good news: you are/have been on the slowest part of the curve. WRT looks&perceptions, things are going to accelerate along the journey.

andrewstuart 4y ago

>> diet/some exercise Can you be specific?

oneepic 4y ago
Sure. For context, I started about 150-160 lb overweight, meaning that many lbs away from having a BMI in the normal range. I was very obese, BMI in the 40's, I think. I started out by just restricting my calories in my diet (1100-1300 cal each day roughly [1], but I still saw some decent wt loss with up to 1600-1700 cals). My core weight loss diet has changed *a lot* but has generally been a mix of whole grains, fruit, veggies, dairy, and a serving of poultry. Hard to explain in one post, but I can try to be more specific if you'd like. 3-5 meals a day, no I.F., just ate less and I felt less hungry overall. The cravings have come and gone at different periods, though, never totally gone. For the first ~70 lbs, I was able to lose 10 lbs in 1-2 weeks by staying on the diet religiously each day. I mainly ate the same exact meal plan every day. (I spent a lot of my day thinking about all the great food I missed.) After that week or two, I would "take a break" and get takeout or other nonsense each day for some weeks following that. Perhaps lucky on my part, I wouldn't generally see much weight come back, maybe only 2 or 3 lbs. In summary, my cycle was diet 1-2wks, break for a while until I convinced myself to get back on the wagon, and repeat. It always helped to see that the first few days of dieting were the ones where I lost the most weight, before it slowed down. To answer the exercise part, literally all I did was take 1-2 walks a day of 30 min each. Not a brisk walk, just walking around the town or our trails. Occasionally I felt like trying to jog or run, or do some lifting, but never got consistent with it. Sometimes I paced around my apartment thinking about how to solve work problems, but that was about it. Since I lost that first 70 lb, the rate of weight loss has gradually slowed. These days I sometimes lift weights or do cardio to help see a little more loss each day. If I'm consistent, my weight loss is like 3-4 lbs/week, but I haven't done it lately. Gotta get back on my diet soon. [1] sidenote, that includes fiber calories which I think technically are not supposed to be included. I'm no nutritionist, even though I came up with a lot of this diet myself using some Internet research and Cronometer.
- Teknoman117 4y ago
  I'm basically doing the same thing right now. Started at 420 in November, need to be at ~220 (I'm a bulky 6'4 dude), so, 200 pounds to get rid of. The most I ever lost in recent years was when I went on Kaiser's medically monitored weight-loss program (a soft prerequisite to be eligible for bariatric surgery through them). Liquid diet, 860 calories a day, frequent blood work, etc. I lost 50 lbs in 3 months. Gained it all back over the following year. Fearing all the side effects, I never ended up doing the bariatric surgery. This time around I'm not "cheating" my way through it. Keeping track of everything religiously has kept me honest about what I'm eating, and I've been taking a 3+ mile walk most days. Been trying to keep a pace that makes me sweaty even in the cool weather of my area. I'm back down to the weight I was after the Kaiser thing (50 lbs lost), but I'm not craving all the things I did then. Diet has basically been whole grains, lots of veggies, turkey, fruit, nuts, oats, and the occasional fish. Overnight oats is my go-to breakfast - steel cut oats, chia seeds, soy milk, fruit, nuts. I've been making a bunch of things from the Forks over Knives vegan diet. I can't bring myself to go full vegan, I love fish too much. Either way, mostly keeping it under 1700 calories a day. I recently joined my friends' gym group and plan to go regularly. Been keeping up with them for the last two weeks so we'll see where that goes. Maybe try to get some muscles to fill in some of the loose skin I'll have.

mjthrowaway1 4y ago

I tell people that losing weight is reverse Pareto. The last 20% of the work is worth 80% of the results.

kar5pt 4y ago
It's also 80% of the effort.
- mjthrowaway1 4y ago
  Doesn’t feel like it to me. I eat 2000-2500cal/day and try to maintain 3500-4500cal burn(1hr lifting, 1hr peloton bike, 1.5hr hike daily). I keep my cardio around 140-145bpm so pretty leisurely. Increasing intensity just made me hungrier. It’s a lot of time taken out of my day but it shows results fast and I’m never hungry. A cheat day is a 500cal deficit and a normal day is 750-1250cal deficit. I know everyone has their weight loss strategy but this is by far the least mentally taxing method I’ve used. It helps to stay motivated when you see results every other day as well.

nyokodo 4y ago

> but it's very hard to see the change in a mirror unless other people tell me Losing 110 lbs is going to be very obvious even on someone with a very large frame, but, your perspective may be highly warped preventing you from seeing the weight loss. It might be worth talking to a professional trained in body image issues. Edit: Oh, and I should say congratulations! That is awesome progress!

oneepic 4y ago
Thanks for the kind words. That's a fair point, it might be warped, although the micro-optimizer in me is leaning towards just losing more weight and seeing if I notice the change after some more progress. One thing your comment reminded me of -- I was surprised to see a lot of my sense of weight loss came not from a mirror, but just feeling my old fat body parts. It used to be more dense, due to the fat, now it feels a lot more like excess skin. The skin is almost as big as before, but much lighter and more hollow, if that makes sense. [edit: added "sense of"]
- kcplate 4y ago
  I completely understand. I lost a total of 170 lbs. While that put me into “I am not the fattest person in the room” category, I am still in the group of “fat people in the room” at least visually. The reason is excess skin. So even after four years of being at the lower weight, in reality the only way to get rid of excess skin is surgical. I am not willing to do that, so I have come to accept that even after all my efforts, I am never going to look svelte.
  - PeterStuer 4y ago
    FWIW, The skin reduction surgery is completely benign, especially compared to the invasive stomach reduction/clamping/bypass surgeries common in this domain. While this has been some time ago and I have not met her for years, an acquaintance confided that the skin reduction gave her the confidence and joy that kept her from relapsing into old bad habits.
- scohesc 4y ago

IkmoIkmo 4y ago

Would be cool to see two comparison pictures (no head needed). 110lbs is a fantastic result, I wonder if it’s hard to see for you because it was a gradual change?

hnburnsy 4y ago
check out r/progresspics, amazing how different people look after weight loss.
oneepic 4y ago
Yeah, I think that's a significant part of the explanation. I'm not comfortable with sharing the photos, though, to be honest.

paulpauper 4y ago

depends on your starting too. 110 lbs will not look like that much if you started at 400 vs 230

ipaddr 4y ago

I lost 100 pounds in a month and a half (cipro poisoning). I went from 240 to 142. I became skin and bones and I lost fat in those hard to lose places. I instantly felt different and people treated me differently. What weight did you start/end at?

oneepic 4y ago
310 then, 200ish now. I got down to 193 for my latest physical, but have been off my diet for the past couple weeks.
- Arainach 4y ago
  Not that I doubt you, but I'm surprised that you don't notice the changes. That's a range where there are huge differences in everyone I know who's managed to do it - particularly in the face, but in the body as a whole. I've only managed to drop 40 so far (260-220), but even then the difference in the gut is visible (even if many other areas aren't as much as I could dream, to be fair to your point).
  - oneepic 4y ago
    Congrats on your weight loss, 40 lbs is nothing to write off in my book. I do have a picture of myself from about 300 lbs, and I did look much chubbier then. I guess I mean to say that my overall shape is still along the same pattern -- large gut, thighs, calves, arms, and face/head, etc. Maybe this is not a great analogy, but y=x^2 is a big difference from y=2x^2, and yet it's still a quadratic function -- they don't look too different on a graphing calculator.
    - treis 4y ago
      There's no way. Even dropping from 270 to 245 was a couple belt sizes and one shirt size for me. Going from 310 to 200 is at least 3 shirt sizes and maybe 10 inches for pants. It's like 50 liters by volume. Think 25 big soda bottles or 13 milk jugs worth of fat. It might be worth your while to talk to someone about body dismorphia.

D13Fd 4y ago

Wow. I lost much less than that, a bit more than 20 lbs, in the last 2 months and it feels like a big change to me. My old clothes fit again and I don’t snore as much. It’s different for everyone I guess.

oneepic 4y ago
The clothes thing was a huge motivator for me. I was at 2X (in US measurements) and was about to burst out of those :) (edit: I neglected to mention, congratulations. It's no small feat to lose weight.)
devin 4y ago
I’m in the same boat as you. Not even 20 lbs, but even 10 for me is a change in waist size and ring size. When I’m kicking butt on my exercise my wedding band starts to accidentally fall off and I can pretty clearly see a difference overall. It’s strange how my fingers getting slim is perhaps more noticeable to me than my waist or whatever, but that is my cue I’m on a roll.

Teknoman117 4y ago

The only way I've been able to tell visually so far are before/after pictures. I'm down 55 pounds after 6 months (diet and exercise) and I don't feel like I've noticed changes in the mirror. However, I've gone down a number of belt sizes and the pants I previously wore around my waist can now be worn comfortably over my gut. Visually it only occurred to be because a friend sent me a picture from a dinner I had with them and I saw how much smaller I looked.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago

Initially I was in a similar boat, but recently I stumbled on a way to be more aware and positive about the change. I lost 55 pounds and still felt like a chonker. At the time, I only had about 10 pounds to go to hit the "ideal weight" I'd set for myself (which was still at the high end of the acceptable range, based on BMI). I never did hit that number; I ended up wandering around that plateau for 1-2 years, feeling thoroughly fat the entire time. A recent injury led to me not being able to lift (for now), and so I've lost about 3-7 pounds of muscle and gained about 14-18 pounds of fat. Now I can definitely notice the difference! For me, it's the little stuff that really drove it home -- my face is noticeably chubbier (to me), and my rings and shoes fit more tightly. I wouldn't recommend going about it this way, but it definitely drove home a lot of retroactive gratitude for what I had -- and sparked some motivation to get it back.

pengaru 4y ago

The thing about getting to a normal weight is it makes being active so much easier, more fun, and less destructive. So once you get the weight off you gotta live the active life and the fit shape will emerge. Being normal weight is basically easy mode for being active, but it doesn't guarantee fitness if you still don't play the game.

krageon 4y ago

If you've lost that much weight and you can't see it (where others can), that's not normal psychological functioning. That's an eating disorder.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
AS someone who's lost a similar amount of weight (actually a bit more), trust me when I tell you that no one loses that kind of weight intentionally without cultivating an eating disorder.